16.2 Background

Some manufacturing problems are literally older than dirt.  Take for example brick making.  The oldest bricks discovered were made from mud and date back to 7500 B.C.  Later, around 4000 B.C., artisans in Mesopotamia discovered how to make sun dried bricks.  But bricks, like many products, sometimes failed to maintain their integrity, and when that happened walls collapsed often killing the occupants of the building.  Hammurabi, the sixth king of Babylonia, enacted a series of laws known as Hammurabi's Code of Laws.  These laws often defined contractual relationships between people and required that people take responsibility for the quality of their product.  Take these laws for example:

• If a builder builds a house for someone and does not construct it properly, and the house which he built falls in and kills its owner, then that builder shall be put to death.
• If it kills the son of the owner, then the son of that builder shall be put to death.
• If it kills a slave of the owner, then he shall pay slave for slave to the owner of the house.

Thus the builder and producer of the brick now had a vested interest in the quality of their work.